


The Choices of Others

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Chapter 82 spoilers, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mentors, POV Second Person, Talking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-11
Updated: 2016-06-11
Packaged: 2018-07-14 08:28:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7162373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Levi says, “You know what’s even harder than that to learn?” When you shake your head minutely, he says, “That the choices of others are completely out of your hands.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Choices of Others

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Brave](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7146392) by [someonestolemyshoes](https://archiveofourown.org/users/someonestolemyshoes/pseuds/someonestolemyshoes). 



All around you lies what you’ve been seeking for the last five years. Serums. Maps. Heretical books. A secret doorway. Paperwork… so much paperwork.

You don’t see any of it. All you see is a face before you, a face that was young for its owner’s age, and that age was young. You see the tense smile that borders on a rictus, the sweat beading on his forehead, the manic glint in his eyes.

_Have I ever lied to you before?_

And you knew. You knew what he was going to do. But you went along with it because — aside from what other choices you had, which were none — what, if your titan were able to speak, would you ever have said in reply?

You sit on the floor, against the stone wall. So does Mikasa, a few meters away from you. Her scarf is over her mouth; her knees are against her chest. The paperwork indicates, among other things, that she has family she never knew she had. She can’t register it over the deafening absence, for the third time in six years, of the family she no longer has.

You’ve been sleeping in snatches all night and into the morning. When you’re awake, you’re crying. When you’re asleep, your dreams are filled with the stench of burning flesh. Each time you wake, you remember the roast you all enjoyed that last night, before you rode out, and you retch a little. And you start crying again.

Mikasa hasn’t cried at all. Since last night, she hasn’t spoken a single word that was not utterly necessary to this mission.

You have a terrible sense she believes she’s failed. Her goal is not the same as yours, never has been, even if you both swore allegiance to the same Corps. Your goal has always been to free humanity. Her goal has always been to protect you and Armin. And other people, now, too. But none more than you and Armin.

You want to tell her she didn’t fail, at all. That she did her duty to humanity, just as you and Armin did yours. But you can barely speak. You’ve seen Squad Leader Hanji — Commander Hanji now, though she hasn’t yet put the bolo on— speak to her with an uncommon gentleness; and Captain Levi, even after he read that one piece of paper, simply leave her be.

You perceive, eventually, that nobody else will be able to tell her that she didn’t fail. In time, she will realize it on her own. You hope.

Hanji is now going over the paperwork with Jean. It rattles in his hands. He was the one who pulled you off Bertolt. (It took both Hanji and Levi to pull Mikasa off Reiner.) He yelled at you and Mikasa to quit being so stupid and crazy, that for the moment the Survey Corps needed them both alive, that that was an order. But you could see in the inferno of his eyes, in the tautness of his fists, in the arc of his bared teeth, in the muscle twitching in his jaw that he wanted nothing more than to join in with the both of you.

Straight across from you on the floor, Sasha lies on a pallet your father kept down here. Connie kneels by her side, holding her hand. She’s unconscious, but all the wounds and abrasions have vanished from her skin, like they’d never been there at all. The streaks on her face are lingering a little longer. In about an hour they’ll be gone too. You wonder, briefly, if her father — the only kin she has left — will still welcome her home one day. If she lives long enough.

You close your eyes, not because you want to go back to your dreams, but because you just want to shut everything out. You open them again at the feel of a strong hand on your shoulder.

“Come outside for a little while,” Levi says. It’s an order as much as an invitation.

You rise, and you follow him up the cracked set of stone steps that no longer leads into your mother’s kitchen, because your mother’s house is gone. It leads into the open air of Shiganshina, filthy with soot, foul with human decay. Your fists clench involuntarily. It wasn’t enough for them to take your mother and all those other lives too. They had to take the place that was the anchor of your earliest memories, your best memories. You’ve long since come to terms with the fact that you’ll never sit in your mother’s kitchen again and have her cook for you or scold you or smooth your hair. You realize you hadn’t come to terms with the fact that you’ll never sit in her kitchen again at all.

The sun has been up for maybe an hour. You remember, a long twenty-four hours ago, landing on the roof that used to be above this spot, your heart hammering with anticipation and pistoning old grief up out of your marrow. You remember, an even longer ninety-six hours ago, riding out amid cheers and sailing flowers. With Armin at your side.

Levi crouches, then sits, on the dusty ground next to the top step. You do the same. There’s nothing to lean up against, and none of you can possibly get any filthier.

He stares off into the ash-hazed distance, silent for a long moment. The morning sun curves around his high cheekbones and sharp nose. The circles under his eyes are darker than they were four days ago. You’ve come to know him well enough that you can see through the tight shutters that are always over his eyes, and now you see a bleak, blasted landscape behind them. You don’t say anything. You have no words in you right now. He called you out here, let him start the conversation.

At length, he turns to you. He eyes you for a few seconds, and then he says, very measuredly, “It was his choice to make.” And something shifts in his eyes, something that tells you Armin may not be the subject, or the only subject, of Levi’s sentence.

You remember that he knew Commander Erwin… not as long as you knew Armin. But as long as Mikasa did. You’ve heard rumors of how they came to know one another, rumors that nobody living will ever confirm. You have no idea what it’s like to go from wanting to kill someone to swearing loyalty to them unto death. All your experience runs in the opposite direction, you think with a savage twist of your mouth.

“I know, sir,” you say. You want to say, _But it still hurts._ You don’t, because you are one of humanity’s most elite soldiers, and not even common soldiers are supposed to complain when their legs or bellies or hearts are ripped apart. Also, it goes without saying. No matter whom you were speaking to, it’d go without saying, but you report to a man with an odd way of making most words superfluous.

“On my first expedition with Erwin,” Levi says, startling you, “my two closest friends were there. I’d known them for a long time before the Survey Corps. I’d picked one of them up out of the gutter when she was a little girl and raised her. The other had been my ... business partner, Underground. Both of them died on that expedition.” He says this not even with his usual flatness; more like he’s stating something that happened lifetimes ago, to someone else.

“I’m sorry, sir,” you say.

He looks you coldly in the eye and says, even more flatly, “They died, in great part, because I was a fucking idiot with no experience fighting titans in the field and far too high an estimation of my own abilities.”

You blink, your eyebrows rising. After he gives you a few seconds to register that statement, he adds, “Erwin … eventually told me I had nothing to regret. That I’d protected them as best I knew how at the time. And that the important thing was not to regret what I’d done, because it wouldn’t bring them back, but to learn from the choices I’d made that day, and carry those lessons forward to the next choice.”

You say nothing. You've heard this lecture before. You wonder how much of it actually has to do with Armin. You wonder if this is something Jean would be better off hearing. You’re not a future commander, you’re not a future strategist, you aren’t even sure you’ll be considered for a squad leader for a few years. You should live that long.

After another pause, Levi says, “You know what’s even harder than that to learn?” When you shake your head minutely, he says, “That the choices of others are completely out of your hands.”

Your throat contracts, your eyes sting afresh, and your nose and sinuses feel hot and moist inside. You duck your head. Levi, thank whatever gods might exist, doesn’t put his hand on your shoulder again or otherwise attempt to soothe you. He gives you the time you need to pull yourself together, for values of “together” sufficient for a one-on-one talk in a ravaged deathscape at the ass-end of the world you know. Which used to be the only world you knew.

When you have, he adds, “For what it’s worth, I have never seen anyone, either Underground or in the Survey Corps, make a decision quite like that. Either in terms of how it paid off, or in terms of how much balls it took to make it. I have no idea how we’re gonna get Armin’s balls into his coffin and shut the lid.”

You burst out laughing, a dark laugh with sharp, jagged edges. You shouldn’t be laughing at that, you suppose, but if you didn’t laugh at a lot of things you shouldn’t, you’d never go on.

“We’d better, though,” Levi says. “Hanji and I are going to make sure he gets a huge state funeral. Ten-piece orchestra, twenty-one gun salute, twelve big-ass horses pulling the hearse, the whole shebang.”

You smile, now, softly. You tell your captain that if he and Hanji and Historia and everyone else want Armin to have the most majestic state funeral humanity has ever known, you will be there in your dress uniform. You will tell everybody what kind of boy — what kind of man — he was, and you will punctuate your words with the thump of your fist against your heart.

But Armin won’t be in that coffin.

You have Levi’s full attention as you tell him in somewhat more concise words that whenever all of this this is finally over, when the titans have walked out of the walls just as Armin predicted and humanity no longer lives like rats in a cage, you and Mikasa and whoever else among you is still standing will go find the sea. You’ll be carrying an urn under your shoulder, an urn painted with the sea and the fields of sand and the mountains of ice and the mountains of fire and herds of strange animals and flocks of strange birds. You’ll all leave your boots on the sand and wade into the shallows, the saltwater lapping around your ankles, the wet grit and the spongy weeds cold and soft under your toes. And you’ll release Armin into what his grandfather’s book called the cradle of all life on earth, where he will live forever in a murmuring blue heaven filled with brightly colored creatures and the secrets of ancient peoples. Where nothing, ever, will burn.

When you’re done, Levi’s eyes are ever so faintly less bleak. The corners of his mouth rise, almost imperceptibly. And he says, “My schedule, as you know, is subject to drastic change. But, for the moment, I plan to be still standing.”

**Author's Note:**

> Chapter 82 destroyed me. I credit [The Brave](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7146392) by someonestolemyshoes with making me want to write something for it. And [Blauerozen's artwork](http://blauerozen.tumblr.com/post/145628381314/were-going-to-explore-the-outside-world-someday) for inspiring the final paragraphs.


End file.
